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World Robot Olympiad 2012, Kuala Lumpur Malaysia The World Robot Olympiad was held this year in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia, at the Sunway Resort Convention Centre. Four hundred teams of children from 34 countries competed in challenges to build robots to solve complex problems. I was lucky enough to be invited as a guest of Lego(…)

Dexter Industries have released a simple yet incredibly useful sensor – a breadboard adapter that allows you to connect your NXT to a prototype project on a breadboard. Definitely a must-have for any advanced sensor work.

SoundMachine is a LEGO drum sequencer that “builds” music using standard LEGO bricks. SoundMachine is an interactive music tool to collaboratively develop music. SoundMachine scans 2×2 colour LEGO bricks arranged in 4 tracks of 8 beats. The colour information is converted to MIDI messages by a Processing sketch, which sends MIDI to Ableton Live to(…)

The new LEGO 9398 RockCrawler is out, and I really enjoyed how the designers chose to mount the motors directly on the pendular axles. Looking at it I realised that by replacing the power-function motors with NXT motors I could make the RockCrawler driven by the NXT. I had a new NXT2WIFI sensor from Dani(…)

Simon Burfield has built a prototype for the world’s first powered LEGO wheelchair using LEGO Mindstorms NXT. It uses Rotacaster wheels for multi-direction driving, and is powered by a total of 7 NXTs. I don’t fancy changing the batteries on that after a day out!

Dexter industries have shown how to use their Dexter wifi sensor, in combination with web sockets, to control a NXT robot directly from an iOS device (iPhone or iPad) or an Android. You can read more at their blog post.

leJOS is also well suited to teaching the basic principles of object-oriented programming; it is Java after all! And what better way to illustrate in concrete terms how powerful Java is than by applying it to building robots?

In celebration of the centenary year of Alan Turing’s birth Jeroen van den Bos and Davy Landman at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), Amsterdam (Netherlands) built a LEGO version of a Turing machine – the universal computing device that theoretically models how all computation is done. You can read about it at LEGO Turing Machine.